Another morning, another great video

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Monthly Archives: May 2011

Okay, so in reality Leonard Nimoy probably doesn’t spend his days living the life of the Dude. But watching him do so in this alternate video for Bruno Mars’s “The Lazy Song” is pretty much pure pleasure. Don’t necessarily love the song, but love this.

There are so many more pants puns that can be made about this video, but I will restrain myself. Mostly because the concept is so rad!

Beautifully shot and edited in the style of a Mystery Guitar Man video, artist Andrew Huang created a musical master piece using 1000 pairs. How’d he get his hand on so many jeans? M Jeans, a Singapore-based brand dedicated to hooking tall men up with the perfect fitting jeans, asked customers to send us their unflattering in jeans in to be a part of the art piece. Personally, I approve on this unconventional means of recycling!

Our goal is a repository of published designs so clear – so complete – that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit.

It’s hard not to find the above concept compelling. Even with the internet, the idea that the essential knowledge of several thousand years of human progress can be collected, collated and distributed so completely as to be considered “a civilization starter kit” is amazing. This is the goal of Marcin Jakubowski and Open Source Ecology.

OSE is a maker-like collective of engineers, farmers, and various other interested parties whose goal is to distill the technological necessities of agriculture, building, and manufacturing down to the smallest point possible; ideally allowing a small group of people with access to nothing but basic tools and scrap materials to build or rebuild a sustainable and viable, modern civilization from scratch. It’s incredibly ambitious, unwaveringly idealistic, and truly has the potential to unleash a massive amount of change across whole swaths of the planet.

What’s impressive is how lively and cinematic it feels, with the camera truly capturing an audience-level point of view; given how much Welles contributed to the reinvention of film, it’s incredible to imagine what he would have done to television had he had a shot.

For some people, a kitchen is a place where wonders never cease. For others, it’s akin to Mordor: a place into which one simply cannot walk and expect to survive. For Hannah Harto, the kitchen is where one goes to drink heavily while playing with fire.

Equal parts Brooklyn, alcohol, and self-deprecating whimsy, there’s something remarkably charming about Hannah’s kitchen exploits. The show is in its sixth episode, so while it’s still a bit uneven at parts, it continues to improve as Hannah gets more comfortable with public insobriety. Even given its ultra-low-fi setup of a one person talking into a stationary laptop camera and purposefully sloppy edits, there’s no denying the sparks of genius that are becoming more and more frequent as the series goes on. I’m still not sure whether she’s acting or serious, but either way she’s far more entertaining than she has any right to be, and I can’t wait to see more.

When I first clicked on the link to this video, I thought “love the mustache and that’s one rocking banjolele but Rapper’s Delight? This whole British schtick is never going to compete with the rapping grandma in The Wedding Singer. But then our dear British educator of hip hop, MrB, mixed in some Run DMC followed by the Beastie boys. To which I say, “Touche old chap, Touche.”